The Moz Blog

An SEO's Guide to Video Hosting and Embedding

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

I’m frequently asked: “How should I host my videos for SEO purposes? Is it better to use YouTube, Vimeo or third party hosting?”

My response to this question is invariably terse, along the lines of "it depends on the style of your content and what you want to achieve with it". Each situation calls for a nuanced approach, defined by the marketing aims of the company and the audience base the content will appeal to.

All hosting solutions have their own set of advantages and disadvantages - making each suitable for different aspects of SEO and Inbound marketing:

Third party and self hosted:

Easier to get video rich snippets for your own domain

Can customise video player

Can build links back to your domain through embeds

YouTube & Vimeo:

Gets the content in front of more eyes

Content will invariably rank well (albeit often not for your domain)

In this post, I’m going to outline the core of four different approaches I normally recommend to clients, defining the basics of the appropriate technical implementation and the types of content required for each approach. At the end of this post, i have also included a brief summary of some of the most popular paid hosting solutions (Vimeo Pro, Wistia, Vzaar and Brightcove)– explaining the pros and cons of each.

Approaches to Video SEO

In my view, there are 3 major functions for video from an SEO perspective:

Ranking, traffic and conversions

Brand impressions and notoriety

Links

These purposes do sometimes overlap, so i think it’s better viewed as a classic venn:

Approach 1: Video for Ranking, Rich Snippets and Conversions

This is by far the most common purpose for video that i come across. Many SEOs want to increase ranking and click through rate with rich snippets in the organic SERPs, while improving conversions with a beautifully designed video that shows off their product in it’s best light.

Location

Include the videos on a page targeting a term likely to receive a video rich snippet

To ascertain the viability of a video result, look through the SERPs and see which rich snippets are currently being returned. Anything with shopping results, local results or a high proportion of PPC will invariably be off-limits; but there will be high volume search queries around any niche, that return video results. Amongst others, any terms including the following keywords invariably return these rich snippets:

tutorial

review

test

what is

how to

demonstration

explanation

video

Ensure your videos are being built into a page where there are a variety of other media types

Rich and diverse pages typically rank better and will invariably improve conversion rates. While web video is an extremely popular way of consuming information - it doesn’t suit everyone. The more text, images and diverse media you have on a page, the better it will appear to both the algorithms and potential customers.

Include only one video per page

The better spread out your videos are, the more terms you can potentially target for video results. Big video directory pages typically struggle to rank for multiple keywords.

Hosting

Either self host your videos, or use a paid secure hosting solution (options detailed at the end of this post)

If you are self hosting; using either your own servers, or a cloud solution such as Amazon S3 is fine. Just make sure to keep the bitrates low when exporting your videos to avoid huge bandwidth costs.

I generally recommend that If you want to rank with a rich snippet and improve your domain's overall ranking - you do not put your videos on YouTube. While YouTube videos occasionally provide rich snippets for the domains they are embedded on in the organic SERPs, frequently the YouTube domain will rank instead and it’s currently not as surefire a way to achieve a rich snippet as securely hosting the content, submitting a video XML sitemap and implementing schema markup. A free Vimeo account is best avoided for the same reasons.

Embedding

Ensure the content cannot be embedded outside of your own domain

While there is no absolute way to ensure you get video rich snippets - you always stand the best chance if you can keep the content unique to your site, giving Google only one option regarding which page should rank for your video. Moreover, making the content only available on your site will ensure that users wishing to watch the video are forced to do so on your domain, making it easier for you to turn that view into a conversion.

Most popular paid hosting solutions allow you to define where your content can be embedded. You will also need to ensure that your video player will not display an "embed" button as an overlay or box beneath the video.

Embed the content with HTML5 and JavaScript or Flash, but not an iframe

Unfortunately,Google are not very good at crawling iframes at the moment; so if you want videos to be indexed, you need to make sure you’re embedding content in an HTML5 player with Flash fallback, or a pure Flash player.

All the paid hosting solutions at the bottom give you this option - as detailed below:

Content Type

Length

Google seem to be relatively agnostic about the length of a video with regard to ranking - though it’s rare to see < 30 second videos generating rich snippets. If you’re aiming to convert consumer purchases off the back of your video, keeping it as short and to the point as possible is preferable.

Style

Good on-site web video content should be considered an “inbound” piece of marketing, rather than an “outbound” effort. If you’re building commercially focused content, then it’s important to remember that product videos are not ads. If a user has visited your site, then they already have partial buy in - so you do not need to hard sell them the virtues of a product or service, meaning the videos should be broadly informative in nature. Imagine that someone has walked into your physical store and you now have the job of selling this product to them - exactly as Webtogs have simply and cheaply implemented.

Note to Webtogs - if you had securely hosted this video and not used YouTube, you'd be getting referring traffic and a link out of this mention!

Another example of content suitable for this approach is a recent events trailer I created for Distilled

This trailer was built with the goal of improving conversions on the Distilled conferences page and helping us rank better for terms around "SEO conference". In order for this to approach to be effective, we needed people to be on our conferences page when they were watching the video -- just one click away from signing up to the email list or purchasing a ticket. As the content is commercial and created for a very narrow audience demographic (SEOs), it would have done very poorly on YouTube and few people would want to embed this content on their site. The potential marketing value of the content was in driving traffic to our conferences page, which is why I took the aforementioned approach of locking down the content onto our domain, in this case hosting with Vimeo Pro.

Approach 2: Video for Links

People typically link to videos in two different ways - they either link to the page that the video was on, or they embed the content on their own site/blog.

The technical approach here does not differ significantly from the approach for getting rankings and conversions, but is more an augmentation of that implementation - suitable for content which people are likely to share and embed.

Location

As with all bits of link bait, put the content somewhere visible, with good internal linking structure

Ensure the content is embedded in a nice large frame on the page (640px by 360px is normally good) and isn’t tucked away in corner, where it will be ignored by a passing visitor.

Hosting

Self-host the content or use a third party solution

The approach here is the same as that for getting results and rich snippets; but it’s even more imperative that you don’t put the content on YouTube or Vimeo, as embedded and shared videos will then only link back to the YouTube/Vimeo domain, rather than your own.

Allow the video to be embedded anywhere

To build links through embeds and shares, you need to allow the content to be viewed on sites across the web

Create a CNAME for your video files

If you are self hosting, you will probably have already done this - but some third party hosting solutions allow you to white label their products and create a CNAME alias - which can be used to make sure all links to a video file in an embed code reference a branded subdomain. This way you can ensure any embedded content links back to you twice; once to reference the video file and once with an attribution link to a page which you can specify.

Embedding

Embed the content in HTML5 and JavaScript or Flash, but not an iframe

As per the rankings and conversions example.

Include social share buttons next to the video player

If you're using Brightcove or Wistia, then you can customise your players to show a plethora of social sharing buttons either as overlays or as icons next to the player. Make sure to include any which seem relevant to your niche and always the big three (Facebook, Twitter and G+).

If you have a different hosting platform, or are building your own player - then just include social sharing buttons as plugins below or to the side of your video player.

Customise an iframe embed code for users to embed your content

Because Google are bad at reading iframes, make other sites use an iframe for the embed. This will prevent the videos from being indexed on their sites, but the code will still appear to the engines as a referring link back to you.

Add an additional attribution link to the end of your custom embed code, pointing to any page which you want to build links for. I normally suggest targeting the home page with branded anchor text, but you can pick deeper pages and include partial anchor text if you want.

Video Sitemap

Create and submit a video sitemap per the ranking, rich snippets and conversion model

Do this before you begin any outreach, ensuring that the video is indexed before you get others to embed it. Assuming you have included the <video:publication_date> and <video:uploader> information - it will *hopefully* be clear to Google that your version of the video is the canonical, and you should still be able to rank for it.

Outreach

Outreach the content as you would any piece of linkbait, ensuring you also try to build traction socially.

Content Type

To be link worthy, video content doesn't necessarily have to be exciting or flashy. People will link to and embed useful resources as much as they will cute cat videos. If you have a particularly tight budget - build some software tutorials using a screencasting program such as camtasia studio. Check this post for more information on building link worthy video content.

For more information about content types and incorporating video into your link building strategy, check out this slide deck from a presentation i gave on the topic in January

Below are some examples of content styles which work well for this "video as linkbait" approach:

Approach 3: Video for Brand Impressions & Notoriety

If your main goal with video is getting your company and services in front of as wide an audience as possible, or make a video "go viral" - this is the approach you should be taking.

However, be aware that virality is an inexact science. Often videos we think of as “viral”, such as Rebecca Black’s Friday or “I want to hug every single cat” do not become sensations overnight - they only go “viral” when a key influencer sets a context for wider public engagement with the content.

Hosting

Host the content with YouTube and Vimeo

Upload it to YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion and submit to any other video sharing sites you can find. Jacob Klein included a nice list of sharing sites in a recent post.

Ensure you optimise both your YouTube channel and video correctly. Check out this guide for a detailed explanation of how this should be done.

Since Google preference HD content, export your content for YouTube with the frame size 1920x1080 pixels. (You can do this even if the content wasn't filmed in 1080p).

Ensure you submit a closed caption file with the YouTube video - this should be treated like page copy and optimised for relevant keywords accordingly.

If you have a paid Vimeo Pro account - then enable the "community pass", which allows users to find your content when browsing videos on the main Vimeo site.

Embedding

Embed the YouTube version of the video on your site

Any views on your site will raise the total number of views for the video on YouTube.com and will help to improve the overall ranking on YouTube.com

Since Google own YouTube, they are pretty good about knowing when and where something is embedded - so there is no problem in using an iframe to embed the videos.

Get the "As Seen On" attribution for the video

YouTube provide "As Seen On" links for some videos, which link to a curated page listing all of the YouTube videos embedded on a specific site or blog. These pages pull in text from the pages themselves, so can be a great way of generating brand impressions and referring traffic.

To get the "As Seen On" attribution for your videos, ensure the video is embedded on an accessible page with rich supporting text and images. Then make sure that you're getting a lot of views of the video on your site.

Video Sitemap

Even for YouTube videos, you should be submitting a video XML sitemap. Although Google have access to all of the metadata for YouTube videos - a sitemap allows you to provide additional information - such as defining the uploader and specifying a meta description for the content.

Content Type

If you want your content to succeed on YouTube (and any video sharing sites), then it needs to be extremely engaging. YouTube audiences are fickle and if you spend the first 10 seconds of their time on showing a branded sting, you will lose half of them.

In order to mitigate against a high bounce rate, you need to achieve emotional engagement quickly. This need is much more pressing than with a text based web page, since the way we engage with video differs dramatically from the way we interpret text. In an attempt to explain this simply, i have put my rudimentary photoshop skills to use and created a couple of informational graphics (“infographics”?)

Cognitive Engagement with Form

Example

Consider that most people who view your videos through YouTube or video sharing sites are unlikely to have prior knowledge of your brand or marketing efforts. This means that you need to consistently work for their attention - ensuring each creation is interesting or entertaining in it's own right.

Don't put overly commercial content or product videos on Youtube

People rarely go to YouTube to find commercial content and as such, the high bounce rate a video may receive will potentially hinder it’s ability to rank in Google SERPs as well as YouTube - preventing you from getting significant views and brand impressions. Unless you have an exceptionally creative and fun product video (think Old Spice guy), YouTube should only be used to share creative or educationally informative pieces.

Examples of this done successfully:

This April fools offering from Lynx is excellent because it succeeds in driving a context for social engagement from the audience: Is this a joke? Is this genuinely something that has been created? If so, how could it work? could something like this exist in the future?

But you don't necessarily need high production value to create interesting content, as demonstrated by this simple but fun recording from Oddbins.

Equally, you can be extremely successful with dry or serious videos, providing that the creations are easy to watch and give information that is of genuine interest to an audience. The Distilled protips, which were all created in a single day, stand as an example of how this can be scaled effectively.

Everyone should be undertaking this "Video for Notoriety" approach in some measure. YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine and if you don’t have a presence on there, you’re missing a huge trick.

Approach 4: Video for All of the Above

It’s very rare to be in a situation where you have a video that will not only aid conversions, but will also attract links and do well virally. You will need to be in the unique position of having something that sells your service, demonstrates creative and aesthetic excellence while providing a hook that will generate embeds and links.

For an example of something that hits this mark, I'm going to refer to a video that Rand showed off in his recent LinkLove presentation

If you can build something of this integrated quality, then you have basically won the internet. While it’s awesome to get a video like this, it takes exceptional creativity and investment. For most companies, it’s normally better and less risky to aim to hit different channels with different videos, rather than to put all your eggs in one basket. However, if you are Dollar Shave Club, this is what you should be doing...

Location

You need to place the content on an easily accessible page, targeting a term suitable for getting a rich snippet, keeping the video front and center of that page.

Make sure the page is nicely linked up internally, so you can spread the link equity you’re going to get.

Hosting and Embedding

The first thing you should worry about is getting the ranking and rich snippet

If your video is in the hands of others before you’ve had a chance to get that ranking and claim ownership, then you risk others being able to get results for your content.

Host a secure version on your site, following the aforementioned suggestions for getting rankings and conversions until you have got your nice rich snippet results.

Then aim for links

Put a custom iframe embed code next the video on the page, with partial anchor text for your target keywords in the attribution link i.e. <a href="http://www.dollarshaveclub.com>Dollar Shave Club Amazing Razors<a/>

include social share buttons next to the video.

Outreach like crazy. Be willing to write some guest posts about the video which can be used to accompany the content on any blog.

Then aim for fame

When the outreach dries up, a month or two later; submit the content to YouTube, Vimeo and any other video sharing sites, but optimise everything for different keyword variations -- so you don’t risk outranking yourself with your own video on the YouTube or Vimeo domains.

Clean up the links

A few months later - find anyone who has embedded your content from your "notoriety campaign" - but are linking back to YouTube or Vimeo as a consequence, and outreach to them with the (iframe based) embed code for the secure version on your site. Explain this code is the higher quality version and that you would be extremely grateful if they would switch it over so you can get the referring link attribution. Most people are happy to do this, as after all, they’ve already linked to your content.

N.B. - the reason why you don’t normally take this two pronged "self-hosted and YouTube" approach for video linkbuilding is that by putting the content on YouTube/Vimeo - you will inevitably encourage future links and social shares to point to the these domains, rather than yours. This may be not be a problem and it can be worth sacrificing potential link equity for greater exposure; but if you’re looking to build links and shares over an extended period with evergreen content, it's normally not appropriate.

Paid Hosting Package Analysis

Feature analysis

The table and points below compare the features of some of the most popular paid third party hosting solutions.

Provider

Wistia

Vzaar

Vimeo Pro

Brightcove

Standard package price

$79 per month

$79 per month

$199 per year

$199 per month

White label embed codes (CNAME)

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Domain restrictions (restrict where you can embed it)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Customisable player

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Auto-generate Video XML sitemaps

Yes

No

No

No

Call to action link at end of video

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

iframe embed code

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Flash based embed code

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Analytics

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

API

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Pros and Cons

Advantages:

Notifies you when anyone downloads your content

Email marketing feature with Mailchimp integration

Superb interactive heatmap analytics

"require email to play" feature can be used to increase mail subscriptions.

"SuperEmbed" embed builder has by far the best feature set of any of the customisable players.

Inexpensive transcript creation service for videos

Disadvantages:

Honestly, not much. Wistia is a great solution for any campaign with an SEO / Inbound Marketing focus.

Anyone looking build videos purely for ranking and linkbuilding should look first at these guys. They understand SEO and offer a superb service.

Advantages:

iOS and Mac OS X Apps for uploading and account management

Easy to create secure download links for users

Simple account management interface

Disadvantages:

Does not have an XML sitemap generation feature, though you can build something to do this with the API

Customisable player lacks social sharing buttons

Vzaar is a robust and secure service, which allows you to easily white label the player and embed codes with your branding. The iOS app makes managing and uploading new content easily on the move and it's simple to hook the service up to your Google Analytics in order to monitor views and engagement.

Advantages:

Extremely good value for money compared with other services

The customisable player has a great feature set

Usage limited by views, rather than bandwidth; which makes it easier to calculate ROI.

Can build free video portfolio microsites

Loads of great support videos and tutorial content

Disadvantages:

Does not have an XML sitemap generation feature.

Can be easy to leave the content unsecure if you get the account settings wrong.

Vimeo Pro is my default recommendation for any businesses wanting to securely host video on a budget. You get a lot of value for that price; and aside from the lack of an XML sitemap generator, there is very little which the service doesn't provide.

Advantages:

Highly customisable player, with API for customising Mobile players

Youtube Syndication (automatically upload to Youtube) - for if you're taking the "Video for Everything" approach

Advertising integration (so you can monetize your videos)

Live streaming feature - for if you are running webinars or conferences

Disadvantages:

Overpriced

No XML sitemap generation feature, though you can build one with the API

Not particularly user friendly for beginners

Brightcove is an enterprise solution, popular with large businesses and developers because of its wide selection of APIs, SDKs and third party extensions. Brightcove has an expansive feature set and offers a great solution for anyone using video in numerous different ways across a site.

I hope you've found this post useful. If you have any further questions about hosting, embedding or the wider aspects of Video SEO - please feel free to drop me an email or a tweet

About PhilNottingham —
Phil is a Senior Consultant at Distilled in London, where he specialises in video marketing, impersonating a pirate and practical jokes.

187 Comments

Great post @philnorringham, I must say, I didn't know that some of those keywords "Tutorial, review, test...etc." were more likely to propt rich snippet resutls.

I think it's worth suggesting that people can also host 1 or 2 short videos on their website's server. If you're hosting a 30 video on the home page of your site (and don't plan on creating a lot of vdieo content) then you can get the same SEO bennifit from self hosting the video.

This is what I plan on doing to my new site, becasue I don't want to pay for Wistia untill I start producign videos on a regular basis.

Phil... nice re-work of your article you posted on your site about a month ago... to your credit you have included more for us guys that lean on the 'posted' side ot things. Given your target here at SEOMoz is mainly SEO's I would assume that the SEO crowd would likely lean towards the Hosted side since there is 'more control' there.

I do VideoSEO. And I have only recently fully embraced 'Social' now that we have Google+ to play with. ("If you love Search, you'll love Google+") YouTube for me has always been a 'social site' so I kinda embraced social before, but I never really saw the proper value in Facebook or Twitter for a business. (Call me crazy but it is was how I saw it).

Like I said, I do VideoSEO, so I understand both the posted vs. hosted sides of the battle (been going on for many years!). For most people that need to attract new eyeballs... I am much more in favor of the posted (aka YouTube) side of things... If you already have traffic on your site, and you want to use video to convince the current users of something, then hosted works well.

In my opinion, the real issue here has to do with control.

If you are trying to maintain control (managers love that) and try using the bountiful waters of 'Social' to help spread your message, You Will Loose Control of your video... period.

Your suggestion of trying to get folks to 'share' your video in your desired way (i.e. using a 'hard to crawl' iFrame) is a worthy attempt to maintain control, but IMO won't work.

When video (or any other type of content) goes social you will loose control. So I would strongly encourage the content itself to contain as much encouragement to get the viewer to your target site as you can. Your meta data may or may not get shared along with the video, so try to build your content in such a way so that wherever it is seen, it has a call to action that leads people back to your target site.

Kudos, however for trying to mix the two factions of the video wars (hosted & posted). I appreciate the fact you have added as much focus into the posted side as you have since your earlier version of this post. Good update!

If your top priority is those rankings and rich snippets - then you need to keep the content tied down and users referring solely to your site to views. However, if your main priority is building links with video, then the iframe embed code is a valuable tool to spread the word and build some really nice high quality links on authoritative domains.

If you try to do the "everything" model, then there is the risk that you will lose control and the rankings, but as i said - this kind of approach is only appropriate in the rarest of instances and comes with inherent risks. Normally any videos that you can build a lot of links with through embeds are not really the type of content that you need to well rank for your domain.

It's always going to be possible for people to copy your videos and upload them to YouTube if they really want to (even if it's just through recording a screencast of the playback). The key is just working out the appropriate approach for each piece of content and making sure that anything you want to be secure maintains it's context and value only when viewed o nyour Domain.

The SEOmoz whiteboard fridays are a great example of this. People probably wont want to embed or upload those videos to YouTube because often the real value of those videos comes in the comments and discussion afterwards - and this can't be copied.

The question to every SEO question is, "It depends," and you've done a great job outlining the different situations in which you would use one process vs. the other for video hosting.

I think it's important that you noted videos don't have to be super exciting to get links. Tutorials are a great examples of this. Just like a great blog that gets used as a resource is link-worthy, so is a great resource video.

Thanks for the post. One note: In your feature analysis section, you list Vimeo Pro as not being able to do CNAME. In fact, Vimeo Pro does allow for this and will let you do this on a project by project basis.

http://vimeo.com/help/faq#custom_domain

The benefit to this is that you can use one Vimeo Pro account for multiple websites. In my testing of Wistia, you can only set up CNAME on an account basis. This makes Wistia difficult to use if you need to host on more than one web site.

I think that vimeo pro CNAME change is only possible with a portfolio microsite thoug, isn't it? While the portfolio microsites are a cool feature, being about to host these on a branded subdomain isn't quite as valuable for link building as making all of your embed codes point by default back to that branded subdomain. I don't think it's possible to do that on Vimeo Pro, but please let me know if i am wrong there.

The Wistia limitation stands for most of the low-mid end hosting packages and whilst it may make things difficult if you're running a single campaign over numerous domains - i don't think it's a big issue for the majority of SEO projects, where you will typically work with one top level domain per company.

Phil-This post is excellent! I only wish I had seen this prior to building our website!Question: our website/theme simply needs the Vimeo ID and then the video is embedded in the included player:eg, http://electrifymedia.com/main_portfolio/video-game-marketing-content/How can I tell if I need to do any CNAME-ing or other things you state, to be sure our site is being google-crawled and SEO-credited?Thanks!

That's fine,All that your site seems to be doing is wrapping the standard vimeo player with some CSS, which won't affect any of the implementation principles detailed in this guide.You will need to do a custom CNAME (if you're trying to build links) and submit a video sitemap etc, as is all detailed above.Phil

Phil-That's great! Thanks so much for the quick response. So if I understand:1) the way our site is embedding our videos hosted on Vimeo is fine and google will not have problems knowing this content belongs to our domain2) if we want to build inbound links, we would need to use the CNAME tricks you have listed above? I've created those CNAMES and if I check the "Share" on the Vimeo player, the URL copy that shows up is still http://vimeo..... and not our custom domain.Am I missing an important step?Thanks,Michael

Yes, you should turn off the share overlay and add a custom "embed this content on your site" box/button below your video, which includes a text link next to the embed code itself. (i've build a took for this - http://philnottingham.com/tools/video-embed-link-generator/)You also need to submit a video sitemap in order to get a rich snippet for that content and have Google "knowing it's yours". (I have built a tool for that too - http://dis.tl/video-sitemap-generator)

Add in the embed code provided by Vimeo to the first box in that tool and then just include the URL of your website in "source link" and your brand name in "anchor text branded. Then click "with textarea in textarea" and place the output HTML on your page instead of the one provided by vimeo as standard.Remove the share button from your vimeo player. If you've set up your CNAME correctly in the vimeo settings, then it should be working fine.

PhilWhen you say "place the output HTML on your page instead of the one provided by vimeo as standard." you mean the button code, not to embed the video (I want to keep the video player I have), correct?

I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean.The output from my tool will include the vimeo player iframe, just in some custom HTML wrapping that will give you a custom "embed this video" textarea box underneath the player.

Go here http://electrifymedia.com/portfolio-of-featured-videos/
and if you hover/click play a lighbox opens. iy you click the mag glass it opens the page where the video is. You confirmed earlier that"the way our site is embedding our videos hosted on Vimeo is fine and google will not have problems knowing this content belongs to our domain"

I only need enter the Vimeo ID and the theme puts the nice wrapper with playback. I thought your button tool would export the embed code that someone could copy and paste in their site, and google would see the inbound link to electrfymedia.com????

That's what my tool does, it just simply adds a text link at the bottom and an embed code undearneath the video.I'm not entirely sure how your lightbox integration thing works, but you can't use my tool for that. Previously I looked at a page where there was a static player, not a lightbox. If you want to continue with the lightboxes, that's fine, but you probably won't get many people embedding the videos. To be honest, due to the content type, you won't have many people doing that anyway, but you may get some links to the page though.I think your implementation is fine. Now you just need to do a video sitemap.

Philone last question, please.I found your cool video site map tool... for the field:This can be on any domain or subdomain, but must be in a media file format (.mp4, .mov .avi etc) since all our videos are hosted on vimeo pro, and I've created the CNAME to point "portfolio.electrifymedia.com" to vimeo - what shall I put in your tool field?thx!

Phil-I feel like a dolt because my upload of my sitemap-video.xml is failing.I copied and pasted the output of your tool into textwranger and google is not being nice and telling me what the format error is.I noticed when I copied and pasted from your tool, there was no line wrap or formatting...is there a way I can send you what I have for verification?Thanks much,Michael

Phil-I wanted to report back - I made a grave error in thinking I could download your tool and just enter into Excel and copy/paste from there. I think that was the problem.After getting that figured out, got my sitemap-video.xml file uploaded and all, I got errors pointing to the vimeo.player URL that I pasted from the Vimeo embed code - aaarghh!So with some more (all night debugging), I tried seeing what the player code was actually being utliized and tried pasting that. Question - could I send you my sitemap for you to check out, or is there some way other than waiting for google to re-crawl my site, to check if I'm finally on the right track for rich media snippets?Thanks,Michael

Phil-Thanks again for your great article and help. I am perplexed why, however, only 3 of the 10 URL's with videos (all hosted Vimeo PRO) have been indexed and it's been 3 weeks or so. The Webmaster Tools page (for video site map submission) shows 8 of 10 URLs indexed, (which is still puzzling) and only 3 of 10 videos indexed.Do you have an idea what could be going on if all the videos are on Vimeo PRO and I've submitted an error-free video site map following all these guidelines? Any help would be greatly appreciated!Best regards,Michael

If some of the videos have been indexed and you've followed the same process across the board, then the issue is going to be page strength. Either your domain isn't strong enough to get everything indexed within that time frame, or the pages are new/not strong enough yet to get videos indexed. Three weeks isn't that long, so my recommendation is as follows ... http://dis.tl/VQJblW

If some of the videos have been indexed and you've followed the same process across the board, then the issue is going to be page strength. Either your domain isn't strong enough to get everything indexed within that time frame, or the pages are new/not strong enough yet to get videos indexed. Three weeks isn't that long, so my recommendation is as follows ... http://dis.tl/VQJblW

Phil-Thanks for the reply. That's disappointing because unless I'm missing something, google provides no guidance on which pages need "strengthening" with inbound links. The longer term question is what does one do as you add more blog posts with video - must a complete video site map (even though just the incremental additions have changed) be re-uploaded, recrawled and waited on each time?Thanks for your insight - I don't think anyone knows about this as much as you do - sounds like a great opportunity!Best regards,Michael

With regards to Metacafe, i would lump it in with Daily Motion and other video sharing sites. If you're going down the notoriety route and have well produced content with an entertainment focus - then it's well worth submitting to. However, it can be tricky to get traction for anything vaguely commercial on these sites as the audience demographic is very similar to Reddit.

On Facebook, Pinterest and other social media - i would say that it's generally fine (and recommended) to share your content whichever approach you're taking. Facebook updates and video uploads can't get indexed like YouTube videos can and so as it's a secure platform with which to promote your content and social media accounts. If you're tweeting content, obviously share your own page. Google+ is a complicated beast as you have the option of either sharing your page, uploading a video as an update or sharing a YouTube video. If you want rankings - share your page; if you're going down the "notoriety" route - share either the YT video or upload the video as a unique G+ post. The former will help to boost your YouTube channel, the latter will help to boost your Google+ profile.

Pinterest is an interesting one. I'm not sure whether it's possible yet to pin anything other than YouTube videos? If you're aiming for notoriety and fame, then it's definitely worth utilizing. Would be interested to hear anybody elses thoughts on potential uses for the platform!

This is another awesome guide that can be a very good learning book to every noob-advanced-pro SEO out there. Bravo, Phil! I want to send you a chocolate (if you like chocolate...) or some nice candy for sharing your experience with video marketing as SEO.

Vediio optimazation is a most popular social media marketing Strategy. Now a days for embed code are change in html javascript its a good for a user its provide a simply put video one to another site. Its really great post which instruct a user easly to prome a video. Great post

I have one query. If I am submitting my video in different video hosting sites, the meta description tag of the video should be different for them ? Or I have to use the same which I have originally used for that video page?

Excellent post, Phil. Have you or anyone else evaluated the SEO benefits of the Cooliris embedded video wall? I can't seem to find any info related to Cooliris and SEO. Using the fetch feature in Google Webmaster tools shows that the Googlebot does not seem to read the video titles or any other meta data embedded in the Flash viewer. Any insights would be appreciated.

So - i'm afraid i'm not all that familiar with Cooliris, though from initial inspection it seems to be an embedded flash file that pulls in videos from YouTube.

As such, the embed would just been seen as a single flash file by Google. This means you may be able to get a video style rich snippet for the page if you implemented a video sitemap appropriately - but the embedded player should essentially be viewed as a single video - even though it's actually a gallery from a user perspective.

Flash is generally bad for SEO as, like you point out, Google cannot read any of the meta data. It's also slow to load and incompatible with iOS. If you want to embed one of those video walls, you can give google some of the meta data they fail to pick up - by implementing schema.org markup and also submitting the video sitemap as previously mentioned.

Phil-Thanks again for your great article and help. I am perplexed why, however, only 3 of the 10 URL's with videos (all hosted Vimeo PRO) have been indexed and it's been 3 weeks or so. The Webmaster Tools page (for video site map submission) shows 8 of 10 URLs indexed, (which is still puzzling) and only 3 of 10 videos indexed.Do you have an idea what could be going on if all the videos are on Vimeo PRO and I've submitted an error-free video site map following all these guidelines? Any help would be greatly appreciated!Best regards,Michael

I have been testing with various video hosts and I see that plain-embed from YouTube works best for indexing and ranking. It's like Google-bot says "Oh this is YouTube, I can see what the video is about".

The video will get indexed, but that page won't rank in organic search results with a video snippet. There's a big difference between having a video indexed and ranking with a rich snippet, mind that you don't get the two mixed up. Just because YouTube videos can get indexed for the pages they're embedded on, it doesn't then follow that your best bet to get a rich snippet is to use an YouTube embed.

Hello Phil and firstable thank you for your article, I lost a lot of time on other websites to find informations about video rich snippet, and I didn't find anything until I found your article. Excuse me for my bad english but I am french. I would like to ask you something : I will be very interested to have video rich snippet for my home page on a querie, but on this queries there are a lot of adwords (three adwords at the top of serp and an other adwords (not really an adwords but an advertising from google) in the third position of the serp and sometime google shopping on the right side, or sometimes google shoping on the top of serp) so I think it's typically the kind of queries for them you said : "To ascertain the viability of a video result, look through the SERPs and see which rich snippets are currently being returned. Anything with shopping results, local results or a high proportion of PPC will invariably be off-limits". But on the other hand, for this querie, in the serp there is also a youtube video (I mean youtube url, not url of a website) with rich snippet video. Would it be a signal for me to have hope it's possible for my home page to have video rich snippet on this querie or not at all (I mean this video rich snippet is here because google want to promote youtube, but it will be impossible for an non youtube website to have video rich snippet)? Thank you very much for your answer, and definitively english are better than french for seo.

Hi Albert,Thanks for your comment. This post is a bit old now and things have changed slightly, with more "mixed rich snippets" coming up for many queries - e.g. a couple of videos, some local, some stars etc being relatively commonplace around generic head terms across verticals. If there is a YouTube result, then this suggests it will be possible to get a rich snippet in this SERP. However....i've never seen a homepage rank with a rich snippet and i've never been able to make it happen as yet. So, my overall answer is "yes, you can possibly get a video result, but not with your home page."I hope that's useful.Thanks,Phil.

wonderful article i am currently redesigning my website and have a problem with the videos i dont want to link here (in order not to appear spammy) my problem is i have a main topic video page (lets say children playing) and in that page different sub topic videos which some of them are similar lets say (boy playing soccer 1, boy playing soccer 2,boy playing soccer 3) in this example you can see that there might be different boys playing soccer and thus different videonow in order to get maximum results and not canibilize do you suggest putting only 1 video on a single page with content which describes boys playing soccer in it and removing the other videos completely (boy playing soccer 2 and 3) of course with redirects.. or would you suggest putting all the (boy playing soccer) videos in that same page.. using perhaps flowplayer video player (which allows you to choose) in a thumb like format?

Hi Layyous,Things have changed a bit since this article was published and I now don't see a problem with including more than one video per page (especially if they're very similar pieces of content) provident you include all of the relevant information in your video sitemap for each URL referenced in the <loc> tags.Alternatively, you could put the videos on separate pages and then rel=canonical to the version 1, but I'd advise against this if it will leave you with a number of thin pages, just featuring one video.So - either method is fine (you could include a playlist rather than separate video players if you like too) but i'd recommend making the decision on the wider SEO and user experience factors - as the video optimisation is fine either way.

Hi Josh,They do still offer the old embed code, it's just hard to find. However...as you mentioned, things have moved on a bit since this post was published (April 2012) and yes, I have now regularly been able to get Vimeo Pro iframes indexed. I recommend taking a look here for some more specific and up to date information on the pure indexation front - http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/If you have only 3 or less videos, then your cheapest option is going to be the Wistia free plan http://wistia.com/pricing which (as the name suggests) is free.Otherwise Vimeo Pro is the cheapest option.

Because they're lightweight, mobile friendly and fast. Where Google struggle is crawling iFrames on other sites that they don't have control over. They can pick up YouTube embeds and index them from a trigger on the YouTube side, rather than freshly crawling them each time they visit a site.Also, bear in mind this article is now 9 months old and they have got slightly better recently. I expect within a year they'll be indexing videos in iframes pretty regularly.

Great piece. Everybody loves video, it's as simple as that. For a somewhat lighter manifesto for video, especially in the field of e-commerce check out this article: http://blog.treepodia.com/2011/09/lazier-shoppers-prefer-product-video/

Thank you for this information. I am in the planning and research phase of video content for my local real estate site. Still not sure which is the best option. I need the benefit of local seo with high volume of views.

Dear PhilThankyou for the post - but wondered if you could help with an issue. I followed the recommendation and purchased a vimeo pro account - I have tested the 'old embed' code as suggested but vimeo now state that it is no longer supported - it still works on the site but plays slowly and sometimes stops altogether stating that something has broken. The iframe code works fine and is fast but of course, no value for SEO. I have even tried to place the old embed code within the iframe - on another recommendation - but this only played the slow <object> embed code as default. Since i have paid a lot of money for the vimeo pro account I am hoping that there may be a solution to my problem continuing using the platform. Please advise further if you can.Best WishesTom

Hi Tom,I have managed to get Vimeo iframe embed codes index on a few occasions, so recommend you give that a go if you're unhappy with the reliability of the old embed code. You'll just need to reference a version of the video not block by robots.txt as the <content_loc> element of your video sitemap - so maybe an instance of the MP4 file on a subfolder of your own site. Alternatively, you could ask for a refund from vimeo and use the Wistia free plan if you're really strapped for cash. Bear in mind that this is an old post and was written before Vimeo stopped supporting the flash playback.Thanks,Phil.

This is clearly the authoritative guide on how to and why to choose different video hosting solutions. As a result of reading your article several months ago, I now have 53 good quality S3 self-hosted videos that are nicely wrapped in schema.org appropriate metadata. I have a great video sitemap in Google and as of a few weeks ago, Bing too. Google says 51 of them are indexed- I have no clue what is up with the other two but I digress. They show up well in searches. The videos play well and Amazon is cheap. On top of all that, when someone plays the video it counts as traffic and time on page for us rather than youtube as you well know. It's very cool.

We did one press release to get people to watch one of the videos and we got some traffic as a result. I will continue that strategy. Now, I am trying to focus on links but am wandering lost in the desert. By what mechanism would you recommend attempting to get links with this video content? I'd rather not put it on Youtube or Vimeo so that I keep all the juice to myself. We actually started them there but deleted them when I figured out what you were talking about.

Are there sites that will let me embed my videos? If so, can you steer me in the right direction? Keep in mind, these are law related and though valuable and informative, if say you are getting a divorce or just got charged with DWI, they otherwise lack the inherent draw of a small pig staggering down a flight of stairs.

I am very happy with the videos as well as the self-hosting we've done. Now I just want to get them out there. We have an easy embed code feature but it doesn't seem to be much of a draw. If we're going to get them embedded, we will need to figure out how to do it ourselves. I was hoping you would have a suggestion as to how to take the self hosted videos to the next level with a link strategy.

Whether or not you have a good answer for me, please know that I greatly appreciated your post. I attribute much of the success of my newish site to your advice. Though not an SEO pro, I was able to understand and process your technical explanations. Many pros don't write so non-professionals can understand it. That's a good skill for you to have.

Hi Howard,Thanks so much for your kind comments, it's really made my day to know the article has made a difference for you!I've had a look through your site and as you mentioned, the videos are essentially sales focussed (kinda like product videos for a service) - which is awesome for on-site conversions and ranking with a rich snippet, but really isn't going to do much for you in terms of link-building as "link-bait". Getting people to embed them on their blog is going to be incredibly difficult, as not only is the subject matter dry and focussed around a specific company - but it's also a tricky subject matter that people usually aren't keen to talk about. (It's rare that you go to a Lawyer for a good reason - and even when you do, you typically resent having to pay the money).Therefore, I wouldn't recommend you spend a great deal of time trying to get links directly with these videos, but rather incorporate the video into your wider link building strategy as a specific value you can refer people to. Practically, this could look like Including an embedded video within a unique guest post that you write for a blog, or boosting the value of your PR link-building with video news releases that support the text release. If you can make a video about a current trending topic and offer expert opinion, you'll get to the top of a news editor's pile - as they can quickly embed your video with a few lines of supporting text and have a relevant, quality article on their site without huge effort.I do have another suggestion that may help you - which i will PM you about.Thanks again,Phil

You suggest html and not iframe. Since at leastt 1/4 of my clients' audiences are viewing on an iphone, how can I depend on their being able to see the video if it's flash?

I am using Vzaar for one client and Wistia for another.Vzaar says that if I place description, title and the page the video is playing on, they will submit daily to Google. Whether or not this has any impact on my search or not, I haven't seen as yet. Do I need to do more?

Wistia is holding my hand and I think that might work out - but it seems their method is different from Vzaar (or maybe their terminology is the only difference)

As we are developing new video, I want to be sure we are doing the right thing in each hosted account to garner the seo and the inline search results for the site that owns the video.

It's just figuring out the sitemap construction that has me boggled; and whether that is something that needs to be done in addition to the Vzaar directions or not.

Jennifer

I have a love/hate relationship with the internet - the love part is having people who know all this technical geeha who are willing to help. The hate part is the confusing nature of the technical geehah that makes me feel so darn stupid sometimes.

Hi Jennifer,I'll keep it simple and just tell you what to do to solve the problems, as it sounds like that's what you'd find most useful.Use Wistia for both clients and use the "SEO" Embed code, which will get indexed and is mobile friendly.Vzaar claim to submit a video sitemap like Wistia, but they don't do it correctly, so yes, you do need to submit one in addition. That shouldn't take you too long though and i have built a tool which you can use if it's 5 or less videos - dis.tl/video-sitemap-generator.I hope that's useful!Thanks,Phil

Hi Mark,I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by "SEO credit", but i'm assuming you mean rich snippets in the SERPs? - if so, then yes, but you'll still need to orchestrate the creation of a video sitemap (unless you use Wistia). For allowing customers to upload....Wistia have a good UGC Widget http://wistia.com/doc/upload-widgetsYou can also do it with Vzaar's API - http://developer.vzaar.com/docs/version_1.0/uploading/overviewAnd brightcove also have it pretty well covered http://support.brightcove.com/en/video-cloud/docs/user-generated-content

Hi Phil - I loved your article. - I have re-read a number of times - I have a single question that I have juggled with for some time:If the intention is not about fighting for a placement in Google results - From your video off your video hosting pageBut rather you are targeting an existing blog page (or whatever) - That ALREADY ranks in serps (for known keyword)And you want to get the video thumbnail appearing / replacing the already existing text listing in serps.And you are not too worried about what the rich snippets actually areAnd you follow the rules i.e If this video is embedded and is properly identified with a video site map (or from Youtube embed) and video is prominently displayed at the top of the page and there is only one video on the page.Are you saying that a video thumbnail should replace the existing already listed text result?Or are you saying (believe) that there is still some part of the Google algo that in effect decides that this page topicality stops the thumbnail appearing - In effect judging the page inappropriate for a video thumbnail and deciding that this topic would be better served by retaining it as a text only listing?

Yes, in essence, the Google algorithm decides whether or not to display a rich snippet for the page in question - dependent on the keyword. Every instance of an augmented video result that i've built or have seen will invariably rank for some terms with the rich snippet and then some terms without. If the mark-up and sitemap have been implemented correctly, a page will always rank with a video snippet for SOME (normally most) terms, and only in instances of branded head terms, commercial or locally focussed terms (where other rich snippets are typically shown) will the page revert to a standard organic text listing.The one caveat for this is that YouTube.com pages always rank with a video rich snippet.So, yes, in most instances when you implement a video sitemap, the normal result will be "replaced" by a video result - though it's actually better to think of the result as being "augmented" with a video rich snippet.I hope helps to clarify the situation a bit. I think, from your summation, that you have a pretty good grasp of how the algorithm treats rich snippets.Cheers,Phil.

I have a question: I have a client that wants to embed a bunch of videos from YouTube on his site. Now, I know this is great for rankings and such but my dilemma is this: does the advantage also count when you add other peoples videos onto your site?

What I've learned is that you should at least add some valuable content to your site as well. (written) to get your rankings to stick for a long time. Also, if the video has not been created by yourself, would it really be that great to stuff your site full of YouTube videos?

I realize it will help your site to get traffic but I want to know what I should really advise this client regarding this issue.

Stuff it with videos found from YouTube and not worry about content yet try to optimize the meta tags on your pages for the videos you're embedding?

Or at least add some written content that's unique and have the videos serve as providing different types of content for the visitors?

He just wants a bunch of videos thrown on there (preferable automatically which I strongly disagreed with already) and expects to get ranked and indexed. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to know if things may have changed for videos and SEO. Especially in this case when just adding a feed of youtube videos to build your site.

Hi Mieke,So - there is some advantage to be gained from putting YouTube Videos on your site, as this signals a rich variety of media types and also allows your pages to get indexed in the video results. However, I don't think this is necessarily going to lead to an increase in traffic and just putting on the YouTube videos won't allow your site to rank with rich snippets. Google don't (yet - they are working on this and will be able to soon) know whether or not you are the original author of a video when you embed it on your site, so where they originally came from isn't necessarily something to worry about; your client just needs to really refine what he's trying to achieve and implement a cohesive strategy to achieve that. There is a common fallacy that because Google index YouTube videos when they're embedded on a site, this means those pages can and will rank with rich snippets in the organic results. This simply isn't true. In order to rank with rich snippets, you really should be securing the videos to your site (not using YouTube) and submitting a video sitemap. There are ways to get YouTube videos ranking with rich snippets for your domain, but they're all hacks and are not very consistent.Therefore, aside from potential improvements to engagement and conversions; i'm not convinced just embedding a lot of videos is going to do much for your client, especially if they're just automated and poor quality. Having a site full of YouTube videos, with no other content will also send bad signals and Google clearly wont value such a site, especially if few actual views are driven from the embedded videos (which they can track).I hope that sort of answers your question.Thanks,Phil.

Hey Phil, question for you... the video player i use for my website does not have the embed video HTML option when I right click on the video. I'm a newbie to the web world and any help would be appreciated. Can I add some HTML code to the video to enable this option? I'm using HTML5 video player from Socusoft. I have huge plans and a growing network of all the "#bestinthebusiness" and by my research on this topic, you seem to be the best and you are very generous with your knowledge. My network begins with the ICAN foundation, and hopefully "we" as a team can can carry the rest of the world on our back and change this place!Stevie

Hi PhilFirst of all 'Thank you so much for sharing this info'!!!I am new to videos and not fully sure I understand how best to proceed. My customers website is brand-new and has 0/10 prhttp://www.sailingschoolgrenada.com

I thought I would add videos to youtube to get a high rated backlink but after reading your instructions I am not sure anymore if this is the right way to go about.

Should I better add the videos first to the bloghttp://www.sailingschoolgrenada.com/sailing

wait about 1 month and then add it to youtube?Looking forward to your inputs!

Hi Daniela,I guess it really depends what kind of videos you have and what the ultimate goal is with them. if you're trying to get some good links, putting them on YouTube probably isn't a great idea and as you mention, you should self-host instead and try and get links through outreaching the content (with embed code) to other sites who may be interested to link to it.But, if you're just trying to get more people to find out about your business and get some more customers - I think YouTube would be a good way to go in your situation.Thanks,Phil.

Hi PhilGreat thanks a lot! My current goal really is to increase my Page Rank. So I guess I will keep adding videos to youtube for the time and change the strategy when I am better indexed.Thanks!Daniela

In case that's of any use - we (Dailymotion) recently launched a new feature that could be relevant in your 'embed section'

Embedders can now monetize the videos they add on their blog or website. (creating a nice revenue opportunity on top of SEO benefits, great content, hosting/streaming for free, additional timespent/engagement)

For reader's reference, I don't think the daily motion publisher feature should change your strategy with regards to SEO for your own videos.

You should be using Daily Motion to post your videos if you're aiming for brand awareness, in conjunction with Vimeo, YouTube and other social platforms.

If, however, you are looking to make money from posting other's videos on your site - rather than trying to directly get "SEO" benefit - in addition to Daily Motion - I'd recommend looking at Brightcove's service and Unruly Media.

Whatever you do, don't try and monetize your "marketing" or product videos in this way - those should be ad free in order to improve conversions.

Hi Phil, bit late reading your article, but really liked it along with some of your related pieces on video marketing.

Quick question...I've taken on a group of blogs with a lot of video content embedded on the pages but all hosted on YouTube.

I've made the decision to sign up with vimeo pro and going forward we'll be hosting all new videos there.

But for the old content, is it worth removing the youtube embeds and replacing with vimeo of the same video. One advantage of course is that we will at least keep the visitors on the site rather than push them over to yt, and hopefully get some shares and embeds on other sites too.

But where we've used the title of the video on youtube as the title of the blog page, I'm concerned that page is not going to rank too well whatever we do, with it perhaps marked as a duplicate of what's on yt. What do you think?

As always you have a great contribution to video SEO. I know the post is a little old but I was wondering if you could comment on the best practice for the preferred method considering page speed.

I'm in an interesting position where we are trying to balance having(multiple) about and testimonial videos for company information, while trying to keep the best page speed and site performance. I know this is probably a tough question to answer but do you have any recommendations for displaying these videos, in lieu of trying to keep the best site performance?

Both the disadvantages listed here for vzaar ("Does not have an XML sitemap generation feature, though you can build something to do this with the API" & "Customisable player lacks social sharing buttons") have both been addressed and are no longer disadvantages.

Phill thank you for sharing the great post today. Video optimization is a most popular social media marketing Strategy. Now a days for embed code are changing in html JavaScript it’s a good for a user. With the video SEO we can make the high rank of a website in search engine and also increase the traffic and conversion. And one more thing is we can build the original links. It’s a really great post which instructs a user easily to prompt a video.

If I upload my video to Vimeo and push it through my Facebook page as it is much higher quality. But then upload the same video to YouTube and push it through all the other channels, because of the ease of dissemination and favoritism by momma'Google. Will one of the videos or channels be penalized?Thanks

Excellent article, there isn't nearly enough legitimate info online about how to approach video, this one has been bookmarked as a great resource by me - Thanks so much!

I have an odd situation that I'm not sure how to handle with Video, was wondering if you would have any thoughts: I've started a blog-type website (under my own domain) where I post, speak about and review independent music videos, talk about design, director profiles etc. I'm not looking to monetize it, but really the goal for now is to build up a topic-relevant audience that can be addressed for future projects. What would my best hosting for this? I can't use Youtube because too many of the videos will be flagged for copyright. Should I host myself, or use a specific service? Ideally I'd want my website to be the one ranking - Otherwise to drive people into the site. I even considered hosting on a Facebook page... your thoughts?

We do a daily tech-show (video) and for the past 4 years, we've been posting all videos on YouTube and embedding them on our site ( http://www.livingsmarttv.dk ) but this week, we've been looking into the advantages of self hosting.

Because of this article, we realize, that we've been working more in favor of YouTube and less in favor of our site and hopefully we can change this with your great advice and our new Wistia account.

Question: have you posted other articles on the subject? If so, can you please tell me where to learn more?

I've been using Vimeo PRO for a while, but they don't seem to have a fast CDN in Australia, because HD video playback is very slow. I just embed everything in SD and never enable the HD default setting in Vimeo, because HD playback is slow even on fast (10Mbps) broadband connections. Maybe I should try Wistia.

Regarding the Reel SEO article - I think there is space for Mark Robertson’s suggestion of a “hosted and posted” strategy, but in my view, it has to be a strategic play and not the default position for an Ecommerce store with product videos.

I detail the nuances of the appropriate technical implementation for said strategy in the “Approach 4: Video for all of the above” section in the article.

I’ll explain a little bit why i take this view...

Aside from the possible ranking cannibalisation (which i agree is relatively easy to mitigate against) there are other potential negative ramifications of putting otherwise self-hosted videos on YouTube:

Cannibalisation of shares and links.

If potential customers/influencers share your YouTube video rather than your product page, you miss out on the link equity. This can also affect sales and WOM marketing too, as product videos invariably make little sense outside of the context of the supporting page. Especially if you want to retarget visitors with PPC ads, driving customers to your site has to be the goal; and duplicating content on YouTube can hinder this.

Devaluing your YouTube channel for SEO through lowering the average quality of content.

From some tests i’ve run at Distilled, I think there’s reasonable grounds to believe that YouTube algorithmically rate channels based on the cumulative and average “quality” of the content uploaded. Practically speaking, if your videos have all been very popular, your channel and new uploads will tend to rank very well. Conversely, if you’re channel has lots and lots of videos on it, few of which get much traction, then the SEO consequence is negative. Therefore, adding a whole bank of product videos - most of which probably wont do very well, can serve to dramatically devalue your channel. It’s possible to mitigate against this by creating a new channel for your product videos (as Zappos have done -http://www.youtube.com/user/ZapposGear), but you run the risk of setting this channel up for failure to a greater or lesser extent.

Devaluing your YouTube channel for users

If your YouTube channel does have great content on it, but you’ve also filled it with a lot of out-of-context product videos, you’re making it harder for users to browse and locate the great, community focussed content amidst the irrelevant sales focussed material.

Negative brand awareness.

YouTube is a community platform, as much a social network as a search engine. For users discovering your brand, you want the first touch to be a positive demonstration of your identity and quality, which video can both help and hinder. Attempting to sell users product before they’ve visited your site often isn’t going to work very well and you can turn off those who would otherwise have been positively disposed to your presence on YouTUbe. Product videos aren’t created with the intention of building brand awareness and as such, they normally do a pretty bad job of it.

As Mark indicates in that interview - the most important thing for product videos is getting them on your own site with a secure hosting solution, with “to YouTube or not to YouTube” coming as a secondary question. It’s always going to be a toss-up between different potential values, but i believe there has to be a compelling reason to put the content on YouTube rather than having that position as the default.

There is no one-size-fits-all option with video strategy, even within different verticals; with business goals and content type always being the forces that should drive decisions about hosting (for more information - i really recommend reading Chapter 2-4 of this guide http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/). I take the view that every company should have a presence on YouTube, but to really be successful in improving brand awareness, there has to be strategy which ties the YouTube channel to the business objectives. Ecommerce stores with product videos are likely to have a nice footage library available and so should be in a great position to consciously build out a quality presence on YouTube - rather than just lazily reposting and retargeting sales/conversion focussed videos. If you have a footage library, it can be a relatively small job to recut and create content truly relevant to the YouTube community and typical search queries used, for the purpose of branding. Examples of suitable content might be: brand ads, help videos about product types, aesthetic views of your products, interviews, mashups of your staff etc etc.

Regarding the second question, I don’t have a problem per se with what i would term “gallery” pages and the author seems to be misleadingly calling “video seo pages” (mainly because the article is ultimately an advert for this product); but, for product videos, these should only be used in addition to - rather than instead of - putting the content on the product pages. You can then use the element in your video sitemap to indicate the page type.

Again, for me, it comes back to the question of “why have you made these product videos in the first place?” Invariably, it’s because you want increase conversions and sales through rankings for the products themselves. through improving rankings for product related queries. In these instances, you normally want the product pages to rank with the video rich snippets, meaning the product videos should go on the product pages.

I have some sympathy with the idea that often product pages are not set up sufficiently to cope with embedding video and therefore hosting the content on a separate page is a workable compromise - but it’s not ideal and is ultimately going to be as a consequence of having a poorly built platform. In such a situation, you’re no better off using such “YouTube style” subdomain pages than you are just putting the content on YouTube.

There is also certain risk involved with focussing two pages for the same keyword. While it’s possible to get for a rich snippet result with the video page and an organic result with the product page, it’s equally feasible that your video result will bump off your product page result (and likely pick up most of the clicks) which could serve to reduce sales.

Additionally, having the pages on a subdomain means any links wont really help boost the overall domains rankings.

Phil,Thanks so much for all your knowledge I read your suggested training guide and it was very helpful. I now feel that we have a very strong grasp of our video strategy and most of this is due to your insight on this topic.

Thank you so much for this detailed explanation. It's amazing to think i have so many videos online and i actually had some of the most basic optimization of them wrong, losing out on easy kudos.Thank you,Ronan

Hey Phil, Thanks for this amazing post and replying to all of the other comments as I had a lot of similar questions to what others asked but wanted to clarify to see if I am on the right page. I don't mind having one video but noticed that if my video has RELATED VIDEOS or show a box of playlists AFTER the video ends that my users may actually stay longer on our website. The tricky thing here is that if I use WISTIA (subscriber) and I embed the SEO optimized video then it seems my video will get ranked but if I use the embedded playlist code then the SEO benefits are not there given the playlist code doesn't have any SEO benefit. Now, I read in another post that it seems that you CAN put more than one video on a post/post and it is just as effective as having one video, right? My thinking was to have one video with SEO and the second video to be with the playlist so that people can see the second video and stay longer on the website. Please let me know your thoughts on this. Also, it seems to be ok to have hundreds of posts and maybe tens of videos and having videos on different posts but with different titles and stuff, right? As long as the video is related to the keyword, right? (simple yes or no answer will do). Finally, if I do the 2nd point above how would I go about doing that on Youtube. It feels like Youtube would win over WISTIA in a keyword battle so I am not sure how I would do this to make sure I can assure myself one of our videos ranked high on a keyword word term. Thanks for your contribution to this community as it has helped me a lot!Sincerely,

"Now, I read in another post that it seems that you CAN put more than one video on a post/post and it is just as effective as having one video, right? " - Yes, but i'd actually recommend only including one of those videos in the video sitemap file so you can control the thumbnail that page gets appended to it in the results.

"My thinking was to have one video with SEO and the second video to be with the playlist so that people can see the second video and stay longer on the website. " - That seems fine in theory - but I'd question whether this is ultimately the best strategy. Normally you want to use an SEO embed on pages that you want to rank - normally conversion focused commercial pages. If you have a library of content that you want on a playlist, it feels like such content would be better placed on it's own unique page. If you do your own sitemap, rather than using Wistia's in this instance, you can indicate a playlist to Google.

"Also, it seems to be ok to have hundreds of posts and maybe tens of videos and having videos on different posts but with different titles and stuff, right? As long as the video is related to the keyword, right? (simple yes or no answer will do)" - I wouldn't recommend it. If you're reusing the content, it probably isn't THAT relevant to the post and Google can also tell when content is duplicated but marked up as being the same. I've seen sitemaps get rejected on that basis before.

"Finally, if I do the 2nd point above how would I go about doing that on Youtube. It feels like Youtube would win over WISTIA in a keyword battle so I am not sure how I would do this to make sure I can assure myself one of our videos ranked high on a keyword word term. " - There's so many factors at play, i can't really answer this question. My advice would be - don't put the same content on YouTube and Wistia (you'll cannibalise rankings and traffic) and also make sure that any videos you put on YouTube are relevant for a subset of that community and can be comprehended fully outside of the context of your own site.Cheers,Phil

Thanks for the fast reply I really appreciate it. So, If i have only have 50 videos of testimonials, etc and hundreds of posts and pages how would I organize those videos to get the best SEO benefit of those 600 or so pages. Reality is that most of these posts are related to the keyword/content in their so I assume the only way google sees it as duplicate is if it sees the root mp4 file or whatever uploaded, no?I honestly am tired of Google's animal updates as they always change the rules to their benefit and not the businesses or users. What was perfectly OK today is not tomorrow and I think at the end of the day they just want businesses to get frustrated to the point where they just end up needing to or having to advertise on adwords....google is evil :)See the frustration! haha!

You know what - I think you're actually thinking about it in the wrong terms. Don't spend time worrying exactly how to get SEO benefit from 600 pages - first work out why each of those 600 pages is going to provide user value and then think about the SEO as an integrated part of that. Google can read media files and work out when the content is duplicated, even if you've named the file differently.If you're trying to "game the system" then you're always facing a losing battle, because Google are openly trying to stop people doing that and have been since the game began. If you want to play their game, then you have to do so accepting the nature of their rules. It's not that they're doing stuff to damage business owners and benefit themselves - they're simply doing stuff to build the best search engine they can and make money off that where possible. They've been enormously successful at that and putting user's first is ultimately the reason why they have achieved market dominance. Google have never said something was ok and then penalised it - they've simply got better and better at working what wasn't OK since inception and thereby offer a cleaner, more user-focussed list of sites in the results.

Thanks for the reply. I want to believe everything you say but when I see my competitors do so many shady tricks to get ranked high on page one become really successful at it it really bugs me. Jealous? Yes. Fair? No. I have more credibility than some of these other websites yet they get ranked better. Trust me it isn't that they have amazing content or engaging their users. Nevertheless, all of the advice you gave was great and I will use it. You are right good content pages are important to the user and I am not trying to game the system these pages are all good content that addresses searches I actually paid for via google adwords and converted to article to address the inquiry. I just wanted to improve the bounce rates, pages per visit to lead to better conversions and figured getting extra seo benefit from wistia via the videos was an added bonus to achieving my goals.

On a side note, lets be real here Google doesn't make any money on organic results only adwords and every day the ad sections have taken up more and more of the screen. Traffic breakdown between organic #1 and #3 is I believe 30% of traffic vs. 6% proving further than google's real incentive is to get businesses to pay for the ranking. It is people that make the engine popular and businesses that pay the price for that traffic. Again, you give awesome advice read all of your posts!

Hi Phil!My Question:If i embed a video with youtube, my site doesn`t rank better, because the time on my site does not increase, right?Is vimeo pro better or must i host my videos by myself, if i want to increase the time spent on my site?Sorry for my bad english!!!!

Good in-depth detail on the comparative advantages of each platform here - I don't know what the experience is in the US, or UK / Europe - but in Taiwan I constantly have streaming / buffering delays when viewing Vimeo or Wistia videos - just watched a short HD clip that a friend of mine has uploaded, via Wistia. Stopped 3 times in 20 seconds. Similar with Vimeo.Purely from an end-user experience, this is terrible. I persisted, and watched and buffered because this is my friend's video - but I don't think most users will be as patient.I don't get any of this with Youtube - have they just got better connections to Asia maybe?Darren.

I'm afraid I can't speak to the particular situation in Taiwan, but ultimately most of it is going to depend on the speed of your connection and the bitrates of the videos you're streaming. YouTube will encode at a variety of bitrates and serve the content usually at a relatively low bitrate and framesize unless you consciously increase that. Wistia and Vimeo on the other hand, will tend to serve content at the framesize and bitrate defined by the user when uploaded.

If you're having problems, then I would recommend uploading your content at lower bitrates until you find a reasonable compromise between playback speed and picture quality.

If this still doesn't fix it, there could be some server side issues where YouTube just have better connections in Asia, like you say, but I'd see what you can do on the encoding front first.

This is excellent and probably the most comprehensive information I have read about "SEO" for videos. I have a ecommerce website and have roughly 20 product informational-type videos, all of which are uploaded on a Youtube channel.

Today I signed up for a Wistia account and am going to host videos there. Would you recommend "starting from scratch," or is there benefit to migrating the videos from Youtube to my new Wistia account?

Hi Jake,Thanks for the kind comment! in regards to your question, it basically depends on your content. Is it good enough and appropriate for the goal? If so - then yes, you should absolutely replace YouTube embeds with Wistia embeds and then just mark the content as unlisted on YouTube.

I want to host my course videos and embed them on my website which is for premium members only. (only paid members will have access to the page having course videos embedded)
Can you suggest a best solution for this?

My basic requirements are
- Members should not be allowed to download the video
- Members should be able to easily get the video source link by viewing the page source
- I should be able to easily embed the videos which would play on in any browser.

I'm afraid I'm not sure I can offer you the perfect "out of the box" solution here - as I think the best way to implement your requirements will be through serving different HTML to logged in users vs logged out users.

This is what we do with the Distilled store http://www.distilled.net/store/landing/ and we use Wistia for these videos which works absolutely fine. You could ultimately use any secure third party hosting solution - so Vzaar, Viddler, Wistia etc are all acceptable.

Hi Phil-I really appreciate the effort and knowledge you've put into this article, and the time you've taken to respond to all manner of questions.For our video hosting, we've chosen Wistia's standard plan product and I've been really happy with it. We are using the SEO embed type and have set up a CNAME, however this functionality does not seem to be replacing all links in the embed code. In their documentation, Wistia notes that "CNAMEing your domain won't change the name in the embed codes. Our system isn't designed for customizable embed hosts. This will merely change the address where you/viewers can see your Wistia account videos." Can you shed any light on this? Will having the Wistia domain, instead of our branded subdomain hurt us on SEO? If using Wistia's CNAME feature doesn't actually replace the URLs, then what is the point of it?Any further advice you can offer would be much appreciated.

No - it wont hurt at all. The CNAME is more a "nice to have" from a general cleanliness perspective, but from a pure SEO side, it's not a big deal. after writing this article, further research showed that the links within an embed code, particularly any behind JavaScript or within an iframe, don't really seem to pass any PageRank.Wistia is the best product out there for hosting with an SEO focus.

Amazing guide, great for any new start and i'll be forwarding it on to a new colleague so he can clue himself up on this stuff. My 2 cents on it would be that a lot of people these days tend to focus on YT only, building up the channel etc (since a lot of people already SEO there own channels). Obviously it depends on the purpose behind things as you say,

The biggest mistake most SEOs (and general marketers) make with Video SEO is putting stuff on YouTube that really shouldn't be there.

The way to sense-check is to use the YouTube keyword tool and discover whether anyone is actually searching for the kind of keywords your videos are targeting - if not, YouTube will do you more harm than good.

Wish I had found this blog a month or so earlier. I had a VA from Odesk create a video tagger that will allow someone to write meta tags to their video including the description tag. I just found out tonight that Youtube strips the metadata in the upload process so now my bright idea seems to have faded to black. If I host my own videos using Amazon S3 for affordability will my videos stand a chance in ranking against a Youtube video? It would seem to me that the Youtube domain would give the video weight and I would not stand a chance. Any suggestions?

Hey Mike,Basically - the same principles apply here as they do in the rest of SEO, the stronger page will rank.If you have a strong site that gets a lot of links and traffic (e.g. SEOmoz) but a relatively weak presence on YouTube, then your own site is likely the one that will rank. Conversely, if the site is a bit weak and the video is being launched on a siloed page, the strength of the YouTube domain will probably mean that that version ranks.If you optimise the two versions for different keywords, then you can avoid the cannibalisation issue altogether. However...as i discuss in this post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy that's normally not a very good idea.Cheers,Phil.

yes i would disable the embedding b/c these are just product videos. I am not really into links and never intend to make videos for links anyways b/c my believe is to give customers max information and options as sometimes things are not that much clear esp in e-commerce world. I am still not sure about video sitemap as these videos going to embed in my product detail pages which I already have in my website xml sitemap. And submitting those pages again in video sitemap will create a duplication. can you clear this point to me please

So - the purpose of a video sitemap is to point search engines towards embedded videos and provide meta-data about them, not index a whole new page. Therefore, having a video sitemap which includes URLs also included within your original standard sitemap is not a problem.

However, should you wish - you can just include the video sitemap elements within your original sitemap, nested under the relevant pages with videos on.

As a video website owner I agree with this guide. But really you need to ask yourself which strategy is best for you. Branding and awareness = Post on YouTube / as many video sites as possible. If you're after SEO traffic, host it yourself or with paid hosting.

If you cant afford the paid, but want the SEO then upload, embed, make video sitemap and cross your fingers.

There are tons of good video hosting solutions out there. Vidyard is fine, Viddler is another one that offers a decent service. In the interests of brevity and simplicity, i limited the comparrisons to just a few packages - ones which i have found the most useful for client requirements so far, but thats by no means an extensive list.

While Google can crawl iframes and are noticably passing linkjuice through them - they are not consistently indexing (non YouTube) videos when you use an iframe embed. I expect this to change going forward, as the demand is there for them to do it, but for now - if you want a video rich snippet, then you shouldn't embed the content with an iframe.

I did mention about including a referring link in the embed code, under the section marked "embedding".

If you want to do video advertising to make money, then you should get a very authoritative account on YouTube and upload it all there then enable ads to generate revenue. Though, if you have brightcove too - you can get high payouts for using their ad system.

Equally, if you want to create videos as Ads - YouTube is a great first port of call.

Example: I would make more advertising money hosting my video on Youtube rather than my site.

Would you be able to provide some examples of this?

Someone like 4oD (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/4od) makes much more money from ads on videos hosted on their site because they do not have to abide by Youtube's ad policies (can play more than X amount of ads), and they can also get CPM deals because of their banners.

WOW. Just...wow. Very comprehensive, very informative, very, VERY useful. Thanks so much for this post, Phil - you've definitely gone above and beyond answering any of the questions I still had lingering about hosting video content for SEO purposes. This has become my new Bible.

This is what i call a very useful contribution. I am playing around with placing custom video on my site for a while now. Still need to finetune the seo part of it and am kinda struggling with this. Thanks for handing out this BIB guide on here. Now i have a strong base how i could implement it on my own site. *pressing bookmark*

This is an amazing guide Phil and it's great to see that you've put everything in one place.

You say there is no way to ensure you get video rich snippets but assuming that you've done the best you can (self-hosted video, keep content unique to your site, video XML sitemap etc), what other factors may decide whether the video will appear as a rich snippet in Google's blended results or not? Keyword competitiveness maybe? Link equity to the domain or even to the page where the video appears? Number of other videos already appearing in the SERPs as rich snippets?

Vedio is very helpful in SEO to promote or brand a business so I got a lot of benefit from this post because from a long time I am searchnig a post like this and my hunt is finished here. I got satisfication from this post.

Quite lengthy but a nice read and quite informative, though some part of it has been recently discussed in a post in SEOMoz, but I dont remember what was the name of that post but you have much more information in this post.

Video captions should be included not just for SEO but for accessibility generally. I think a lot of what we do in terms of making sites understandable for search engines in similar to making sites understandable for users of screen readers etc. I will be adding them to some videos I just posted - hadn't thought to previously.

Hey Phil, I just had one more question regarding this. If I use some content for displaying on the images then would that be considered spam. The content that I will use will be taken from the website itself.

For instance, my website is on pre-school nursery and I would want to do the video submissions and photo sharing activities for it again.

I am also having a hard time increasing its PR. If you have any suggestions, advices, opinion regarding this as well then please please please do let me know.I also have its facebook page and a twitter account.

I'm afraid i'm not sure I completely understand your question. Do you mean "will it be considered spam if the image sequence video you create is comprised of images already used on the site?" If so, then the answer is no - this wouldn't be considered spam. If you're self hosting your video - Google can't really tell what is in the video file, only index meta information about it such as codec, bitrate, length and size. A video file which uses duplicated static images within the composition is still a unique bit of content from the search engine's perspective - and so i would encourage you to build out these videos.

In terms of PR - to be honest, I really wouldn't worry about it. Toolbar PageRank is not an accurate measure of site value or authority. If you're building links, creating new content and expanding your audience base - you can rest assured that the metrics that count will be moving in the right direction.

Great Post! I would like to know though how can photo sharing be as effective as video sharing in SEO. Also, what should one do if there is no official or a proper video for submission. Right now I just use the images on my website to create videos. Could you please help me out. I would appreciate all suggestions and ideas.

In what sense would you like to know whether photo sharing can be effective? Do you mean in link building?

Using image libraries to create videos can be a good strategy - you can use programs like aftereffects and motion to make beautiful image sequences that work nicely as videos and don't incur huge production costs.

Quick clarifying question - I was looking into Kaltura as a self-hosting path, as you recommended, and realized if you just install the WP plugin, videos you upload are actually hosted on Kaltura servers... Is this essentially the same as cloud hosting or using Vimeo Pro? (As far as SEO goes)

In short - Yes, that is the same approach as far as SEO goes and is a good solution. Kaltura offer a number of different products - including an open source player and video hosting with 10GB free streaming. The WP plugin links into the Kaltura Video platform service, meaning you will need to buy subscription if you go over the 10GB limit.

Hi Phil, Thanks for great article. I have an e-commerce site and i have around 50-70 product videos, which I will put them on product shopping page, so my customers can see the product detail, these are not just video pages but actual shopping pages with videos, Do I need to submit my video sitemap to google? if so how would I do that. also if ppl are sharing videos or embedding them whats the advantage for me? do i just disable the embedding? please explain Thanks

Yes - you will need to submit a video sitemap to Google. You can do this via webmaster tools, and you should also make sure you upload the file at something sensible like http://asimssite.com/video_sitemap.xml. From here you should then reference the sitemap in your robots.txt file, as you would any other sitemap, by putting "Sitemap: http://asimssite.com/video_sitemap.xml

The advantage of people embedding and sharing your videos is essentially getting Links, so that your site ranks better in the search results. Search engines use links as a measure of authority, so - in simple terms, the more links you have, the better you will rank. However, you need to ask yourself whether people are really likely to share or embed videos. Typically, people don't embed or share product videos very much, because the content makes little sense outside of the rest of the details about the product. They may link to the page with the product on as a consequence of the good video, but for this, you don't need them to be able to embed the file. The disadvantage of embedding is that you may find others rank for your key terms with your video, if they embed it but have a higher authority site. So...generally for product videos i would recommend disabling the embedding, as the main focus for you here is almost certainly increased traffic and conversions.

Hi Phil,Thanks for the wonderful post.I have some questions. I have a set of videos on youtube which I haven't yet posted on my domain.So I thought of optimizing the ones on youtube.I did the titles,description and tags from all the 15 videos and what I see is that a few days after ,google videos has my videos on first page for my keywords. I was delighted to see that only with the on-page optimization I got results, but this was for only 3-4 days, and now when I google the keywords ,the videos are nowhere to be seen in the google videos result page,i searched until page 15 or so. this is really strange. I did nothing ,infact I was starting my off-page on the youtube videos ,but now I have no clue what to do ?Could this have happened because I had like 5-6 keyword phrases each for my videos. But if this is not accepted by google,why did it show my videos in the first place. I am really confused .Please help !!

I'm afraid it's quite difficult for me to come up with any real suggestions for your situation without having a further explore into the content and keywords in question.

It may be that you just had rankings in the video results for a short period by virtue of being "fresh content" that Google deemed relevant for the keyword, but has now fallen back into a more stable position. I wouldn't have thought it's got a great deal to do with the keywords you've tried to optimise your videos for - although if you have over engineered your titles and descriptions with too much keyword stuffing, this could indeed be harming the overall rank.

Thank you for an incredibly useful post! I am exploring video optimization for a client, and am wondering if it is worthwhile to create a video XML sitemap given their situation:

1. The goal of the videos is to increase brand/issue awareness and education (health-related)

2. Their videos are hosted on YouTube and embedded in iFrame on their site

3. Google has indexed all of the video pages on their domain, though the YouTube version ranks better for all of them

4. The video page URLs are already included in the site's general XML sitemap

Given this information, is there value in creating a video XML sitemap too? Or would we be better off creating a Vimeo account and adding the videos there to increase viewership with a wider audience?

The current set-up is obviously not great for link building, and the embed and share links on the iframe versions link back to the YouTube version. Do you recommend adding separate share/email buttons to the client video page?

That's a selection of great questions! In short - it's hard for me to come up with definitive answers here without seeing the content, but I'll do my best to provide general pointers.

XML Sitemap:

It isn't going to do you any harm, but I wouldn't expect to see any tangible returns on the rich snippets or ranking front off the back of it. Video Sitemaps are ultimately about providing additional meta-data to the search engines and from that perspective, it's worth doing just to ensure you're offering up the most information you can. We don't know what Google will do with the sitemap information going forward and so my general recommendation would be yes, create and submit one, but only because it's a small job and best practice. YouTube videos now basically always get indexed on a site, by virtue of a playback trigger, but this doesn't make them likely to appear in Google organic search for the external domain.

If the goal is brand awareness, you can certain create a Vimeo account and upload the content there (assuming it's not overly commercial), but it would recommend leaving the YouTube versions embedded on your site.

You could add separate email and share buttons, but I'd recommend really thinking about whether the content is suitable for link building and likely to get a lot of shares. If most people watching the video are finding it through YouTube (check view stats against page views in GA to get a general feel) then there's probably little point. However, if the page gets a lot of views and some social activity any way, custom share buttons could be a good move. However, remember that in these instances, you're getting people to share a page and not a video - so consider the rest of the surrounding content and whether this is "shareable".

Thanks for the quick response! A little over half the views occur on YouTube, with the remaining half divvied up amongst other sites and mobile. This client's CMS is ExpressionEngine, and I haven't found an easy way to auto-generate a video XML sitemap. If you know of any modules or add-ons that do this within EE, I'd love to know them!

I'll look further into Vimeo - at a quick glance, I don't see a relevant category (e.g., "Health") but I'll dig deeper to check it out.

I'm afraid i am not aware of any ExpressionEngine Add-ons that will allow you to autogenerate a video sitemap - But, it really shouldn't be a huge task for you to build one out, assuming there aren't thousands of videos.

Thanks for the great article, very insteresting. I am curious to know your opinion on exact location of video on product pages for e-commerce websites. At present our videos are located below the description which I feel could be a bit too far down (especially as our descriptions at times can be quite lengthy). As video is the the richest content we have on the page should it not be as far up as possible to increase customer engagement? Is there any optimum positioning for seo purposes? Very intrigued to hear your opinion. We are about to engage in a substantial video embedding campaign so keen to get it right first time! Here is a link to a typical product page at present -

Thanks for the question - sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you.

In short - yes, it does matter, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I would recommended doing some CRO split testing with different page structures to see firstly which users watch the video and whether or not this helps with eventual conversions.

My gut is to agree that your videos are too far down and should be moved up, but ultimately I think you should use a data driven approach to working out which page structure will optimize conversions best, rather than going on gut feel.

From a core SEO perspective, no I don't think the location of the video matters that much - Usability should be your primary concern.

More critical for your site i think is moving those videos from YouTube onto a self-hosted platform. YouTube is normally a bad place for product videos and I hope you don't mind me pointing it out - but I think yours is a classic example. Those videos do not fit in well with the YouTube community, who invariably do not search commercially and therefore give you a relatively weak YouTube channel with few views while providing none of the ultimate benefit you could get by securing the content to your page and aiming for video rich snippets in the "1. rankings and conversions" model detailed above. YouTube.com currently gets the result for your video, rather than your own site.

Thanks for the post, lots of great information. I wonder what your thoughts are about my site. I do a daily one minute video about our son who was born with Down syndrome, which means I post A LOT of vidoes! (1, 1 minute video every single day.) We are creating an online narrative of this life to give the world a window into what life is like raising a child with Down syndrome.

At first I was using Vimeo Pro (manly becuase it looked so much nicer than Youtube) but I reliazed I was missing out on all the people searching for videos about Down syndrome on youtube, so I switched and started uploading (and embedding) all my videos from youtube. This way I can capture people searching youtube for those vidoes as well.

I wonder if there is a better way to do what I'm doing, or if you have any advice to help my videos (and site) be found by the people looking for that content.

I do not have a video sitemap right now, but know that is something I need. I just didn't know how to do it since I was using youtube to host my videos.

Clearly, the main focus of your site is broad awareness and engagement, rather than sales or specific conversions and so YouTube works really well for the goals you have and the style of content you are creating. Your videos are getting quite a lot of views, especially given that there is fresh content each day and you've built up a nice community of subscribers and interested parties on YouTube. Moreover, your videos make sense outside of the context of the wider site. Anyone searching for long tail related terms e.g. "Baby with down syndrome playing" will find your videos ranking will in the organic SERPs and the YouTube platofrm will provide them with exactly the type of content they were interested in, while giving more of your videos as related recommendations and opportunities to discover your site and channel.

The value of your creations is not contingent on a specific page context and so simply "getting it out there" is the right thing to do and YouTube is the best hosting platform to do that with.

If i were to have one recommendation for you, it would be to continue to add the content to your already pretty authoritative Vimeo account as well. For your focus and style of content, there isn't any harm in having videos duplicated across those two networks. Continue to embed the YouTube versions - but by all means have the videos on vimeo.com too.

I had a quick question for you. I notice if i do a site:noahsdad.com and click on video I have a ton of youtube videos being indexed that I have embedded on my site. However it doesn't look like any of those are being soon as rich snippets on they main google search page. I was told that using Wistia would help me get some of the videos to show up on the main SERP. I was curious your thoughts on that, or how that is different than the youtube videos that are indexed.

Also I am trying to figure out a way to add a video site map to our site that includes these youtube videos. Is that something that can be done?

The issue with rich snippets and YouTube videos is not that you can't get them for your site, but rather that YouTube.com will also get them and typically be the one ranking for the target keyword.

Google will often choose not to include video rich snippets for a page if it doesn't seem relevant for the search query and especially with YouTube embeds - its generally sporadic and unpredictable. Using Wistia and submitting an XML sitemap is a more cast-iron method of ensuring you get the rich snippets where applicable - as the content can be secured only to your site, embedded as a flash file and referenced through the XML sitemap Wistia will generate for you automatically. Google treat YouTube videos differently to other "uncrawlable" video files - almost treating a YouTube embed as a reference and link to a page on YouTube.com and in that sense, not proprietary unique content.

You can create an XML sitemap for YouTube embeds and from the tests i've done, this seemingly can help to ensure you are given the video rich snippets. However, it's certainly not a guarantee and with no way to stop YouTube ranking as well/instead, so if you really want the rich snippets at top priority - YouTube embeds are not really the way to go.

However, as previously mentioned, in your situation Rick - I would stick with YouTube, create an XML sitemap and accept that you may get rich snippets on occasion, but it wont be a guarantee.

I thank you for telling people why YouTube is not always the go to for everything Vimeo Pro is great the best of both worlds (and better looking then YouTube I feel) Any way I moved to LimeLight Video I love it and it is cheep.

Cost have droped vzaar (now only $26 a month.) is a great alternative to Wistia

FYI Brightcove is only $5 a video now as well ( good if you have only one or two)

Look at more I think LimeLight rocks but what are peoples thoughts on the platforms here http://blog.vidcompare.com/

I'm afraid that I have removed the links and overtly promotional text from your comment as i felt that this inclusion provided no additional value or information and was simply included for SEO purposes.

Additionally, the costs of Vzaar have not dropped, i was just quoting for the mid level package, rather than the basic.

I did not mean to sound promotional. In fact I have literally no ties to any of those businesses except for bills that I must pay. I sorry if I came across in a manner that looked like I was promoting a particular platform. I will tell you after a little more research I am switching from the platform I was on before to another platform. I will not mention them but that should pretty much tell you that I have no allegiance to any video platform. I apologize if I told the price of Vzaar I am sorry I thought you ment base. This was good article you wrote I hope you understand I did not mean to give the wrong impression.

To use videos for option 1, building rank and whatnot I've decided to use vimeo pro. Do I need to restrict it so that my videos only show up on my website (and not even vimeo) or just make it so that it shows up on vimeo but only embedded on my website?

Yes - you need to restrict it so that the videos only show up on your website.

To do this, you need to disable the "community pass" here https://vimeo.com/settings and then under the "where can your videos be embedded?" heading on https://vimeo.com/settings/videos pick "only on sites i choose" and choose only your own domain.

I manage an ecommerce site and we currently have two different styles of videos on the site. The first style are Product Videos which are listed directly on the product description page, these are typically pretty short between 30 - 90 seconds. We than have "How To.." videos which are typically technical in nature and are longer in the 8-10 minute range. I view the product videos as assisting in increasing our conversion rate for customer already on the website, where the How to Guides we use more as branding as I feel that these bring in new viewers who are really just looking for a video on How to do something, the How To Videos have much more views than a product video (i.e a How To Video may get 50,000 views where a product video gets 1,000 views), however we do not get many conversions to purchase from these How To videos. In the following set up would it make sense to host the product videos through Wistia and than have the How to Videos hosted on You Tube? In this approach would we need to change anything up in the video site map we submit to Google? Another approach we discussed is to host both the product videos and How to videos on our website using wistia and then post to youtube as well, what are thoughts about hosting / posting in both places? Thank you and I really appreciate all the useful information in your post.

P.S. Currently all of our videos our hosted on Youtube and embedded on our site in an iframe.

so - I'm afraid I don't really like answering these kind of questions, because ultimately any decisions on the hosting front have to be content driven and I can't really provide truly considered advice until I've had a look at the website, the content, the analytics and the wider businesses goals associated with the online marketing strategy.

However...from the information you've given me, I'll do my best to come up with an appropriate answer. Almost certainly, you should switch your product videos to Wistia. If the product videos are getting 50 times less (organic) views than the how-to videos, this is obviously a clear indicator that they aren't performing for you on YouTube and moreover, if you want the conversions and rich snippets - you'll need to self host (or use Wistia) to get that. Instead of taking them off YouTube though, i would just change the settings and make the content "unlisted", so the videos don't rank in YouTube or Google, but the accrued views still count towards your overall count.

For your how-to videos, I would suggest it's probably best to leave these on YouTube - but make sure you make the decision based on where most of the views are coming from. If most people are watching the video through organic search, then landing on your How-to page through browsing the site, you may want to switch and self-host so you can get the Rich Snippets - but if most of the views are coming from YouTube.com rather than your site - it's almost certainly best to leave the YouTube versions up and embed those to ensure you're always compounding the views and positive metrics on that version. For a how-to video where you goal is brand awareness and general promotion - there is going to be little to be gained in putting new versions up on Wisita and then splitting your view count across two platforms. For brand awareness, a user watching the video on YouTube.com is likely just as valuable as the user watching the video on your site, and therefore you shouldn't mind YouTube getting the rich snippet result.

Hi Phil - Thank you so much for the thorough reply. I have a couple follow up questions which I hope you can help with.

First as far as google search goes have you seen self hosted video perform better or worse in Search compared to Youtube hosted videos. If we self host we will also have a lot of good relevant content wrapped around the video so the video will not be the only thing on the page, could this actually cause self hosted to perform better than youtube since we will have a lot of extra content on the page? I know I am going to get some kick back from others in the organization as there opinion is that if we self host than we cannot compete with Youtube videos, what has been your experience on this front (have you seen self hosted / wistia perform better or worse than youtube videos for google search).

Secondly I have listed typical analytics for a How To video below, this video is currently hosted on Youtube and has 60,000 views. With the data below do see that there enough YouTube search to keep the "How To videos.." on Youtube or would you suggest self hosting these as well?

No worries - glad i can be of help. I'll answer your points in reverse Order.

From the Analytics - Yes, it's quite clear that most of your views are coming from YouTube and therefore i recommend keeping it on that platform.

I really can't answer the first part with much certainly, as there are so many contributing factors - but essentially, no. 9 times out of 10, YouTube will outrank self hosted videos. But, video results tend to sit at certain points in the SERPs (3 & 6 are frequent) and if your queries just have a few video results and you then remove one (by making YT unlisted) your content should be in a good position to potentially take that spot when you submit your video sitemap. If you're looking at trying to out rank loads of youtube videos on a very video heavy search result - you may have difficulty (but i doubt this is true for a commercial term).

But, I think you should ultimately ignore this issue altogether. The real argument you should be making for change in your organisation is not ranking, but rather actual return on investment. Hosting on YouTube is currently doing very little for you with these videos. They aren't getting many views, they're preventing the relevant page from ranking with a rich snippet (It's an Ecommerce query - what use is a result without the product!?) and are essentially meaning you don't get the proper value you should receive from the videos you've created.

You should be aiming for rich snippets in order to improve traffic and conversions - neither of which you're going to maximise when YouTube is ranking instead of your domain. Even if you drop from 3rd place to 6th, you'll likely get more traffic than you previously did through referring clicks off the back of YouTube videos.

I would be interested to get your viewpoint on this article http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-cannibalization-ecommerce/ which takes an opposite view on how to handle product videos and youtube.

Secondly have you ever used a sub domain for product videos as outlined here http://videoretailer.org/commerce/why-video-seo-sites-are-a-good-thing-for-product-videos/ this article states that this has been good for video seo. Would you suggest this approach or would you suggest hosting the video directly on the product page? Our product pages are set up in a way where we we could have a video that could apply to 5 different product pages (i.e. a 1/2 HP pump, 3/4, 1.5, 2, 2.5, etc..) is it okay to list a video on multiple product pages? As far as the Google sitemap goes I believe you can only supply one display url for SERPs so would you suggest using the most popular product as the display URL for the sitemap or create a separate video optimized page which has all 5 items on it.